Gospel Living

We’re moving onward in our series called ‘Stand Firm” where we’ve been doing a deep dive into the Books of 1 & 2 Peter. We’ve been focusing the last few weeks on a section of the letter where Peter exhorts his audience to live into their new identity as children of the Heavenly Father. But this week we’re moving into the heart of the letter that focuses on how we live as Christians in light of our new birth — our new identity as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and as God’s special possession. For Week 12 we taught through 1 Peter 2:11-12 which read,

11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh,which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, sothat when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorifyGod on the day of visitation.

The BIG IDEA for this week reinforced the idea from last week of living as a Creative Minority. A Creative Minority believes — as Karl Barth states — that “the church exists to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world’s own manner and which contradicts it in a way that is full of promise.” David Wells also puts it brilliantly when he says, “The choice for God now has to become one in which the church begins to form itself, by his grace and truth, into an outcropping of counter-cultural spirituality. It must first recover the sense of antithesis between Christ and culture and then find ways to sustain that antithesis.… It must give up self-cultivation for self-surrender, entertainment for worship, intuition for truth, slick marketing for authentic witness, success for faithfulness, power for humility, a God bought on cheap terms for the God who calls us to costly obedience. It must, in short, be willing to do God’s business on God’s terms.”

Give the sermon a listen and we hope to see you this week at a Family Meal and/or a DNA group to dive even deeper.